Monday, November 15, 2010

Freely Ten

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

Dramatis Personae 2 is "the second version of an app designed to track the personalities and information used by authors in writing fiction novels/short stories" (OS: Mac OS X)

Escaro is a "personal organizer. In fact it's much more than that - it's a complete organization solution! Escaro has been designed to be fun, simple & efficient, while still giving you all the power features you need, so you can do what you want, when you want, with the minimum of fuss. Escaro enables you to quickly organize and access all your important information (including time-critical & date-critical events, todo items, contacts & bills) in a streamlined package that helps you get the most out of your life" (OS: Windows 98/ME/XP/Vista/7)

Mendeley is a "free reference manager and academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research." Features: "Automatically generate bibliographies; collaborate easily with other researchers online; easily import papers from other research software; find relevant papers based on what you’re reading; access your papers from anywhere online; read papers on the go with our new iPhone app" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

Someone out there (you know who you are) asked me if there was a freeware program available to help calculator mileage for tax purposes. I found this one, which looks like it might be of some use: The MMC (Monthly Mileage Calculator) "stores Locations, Dates, Times Visited and Cents per mile for totaling at the end of the month" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)

NaNoWriTool gives users "the ability to edit plain text files, much like Notepad; a real-time word counter in the status bar; the word counter exactly matches the counting algorithm of the NaNoWriMo website; showing the word count target for the day in the status bar (assuming you write the same number of words every day); a timer for word wars that also counts the number of words you have typed during the word war; a full screen mode that eliminates all distractions; changing of the display font to suit your preferences changing of foreground and background colours for maximum readability; simple formatting features, in particular: chapter headings and emphasis; a wide margin that makes text easier to read and can be clicked and dragged to select lines of text" (OS: Windows with .NET platform installed, Linux and Mac OS X with Mono installed)

The next incarantion of Papel is almost here: Romanzo, an "open source software project currently in the requirements planning phase. When completed, it will offer much of what Papel promises but with several key advances." In the meantime, Papel is still available for download at the Romanzo developer's mirror site.

sqlDesktop "can help you organize documents, WEB pages, database queries, multimedia data on CD ROM or DVD, etc..as easily as in an ordinary office environment. With sqlDESKTOP you can place related documents in the same binder even if some are computer files and others INTERNET Web sites or database queries . . . Information is easy to find because you don't have to remember the exact name of the document or where you put it. Visually locate what you are looking for in a familiar office environment and click on the selected document. sqlDESKTOP will take care of all the tasks: launching the right program on the right data file, pointing the browser on the right URL etc.. It's easy because sqlDESKTOP works the same way your mind works" (OS: Windows (All) / Linux)

Story Surfer Integrated Writing Environment is "an application to write almost anything: magazine articles, short stories, or novels. It will handle creating and modifying the writing project's series/story information, as well as the story's characters, character/familial/organizational relationships, locations (from metaverse on down to local site information), items that need description, timelines, manuscript submission tracking, and a ToDo list. It will also be able to handle extraneous research (mostly html, rtf, or text files) to be integrated and searchable" (OS: unspecified other than independent/portable, probably Java-based)

taskTome is a "personal information manager which allows you to maintain a list of events, diary entries, tasks, notes and financial information. It is light-weight program that displays the information that you need to keep track of without cluttering it up with un-needed features and controls, while still allowing you complete control over the information - including the ability to search, format, print, export and customize data" (OS: Windows XP/Vista/7)